Outbound

Which brings us full circle, to Jenn. Poor Jenn.

Her father had a massive heart, a few days after she was released from her psychiatric hospital, and I think, from what I was able to gather from news reports, she finally broke him down and tore him apart. That was the official version, anyway. So yeah, then I got a call from Shelly late at night, and she told me that I needed to come up to LA on the double, and that it had something to do with Jenn.

"Should I bring Tracy?"

"Not this time," Shelly said -- cautiously.

"You mean, like I need to run to the airport right now?"

"Now would be good."

She picked me up at the airport and we drove down to Newport Beach in near silence.

"What happened, Shelly?"

"Jenn, well, she shot her father."

"She -- what?"

"Right in the main pump. He dropped to the ground, dead as a doornail. Her mother watched it go down, then ran out of the house. Jenn's in the ER, doped up and out of it, but she asked to see you. Won't talked to the police until she talks to you first."

"Fuck."

"You got it."

So I shut up the rest of the drive, tried to ignore the heavy traffic on the 405 -- at two in the morning -- and by the time we got to the hospital, and to the room where she was "under observation" -- I was really in a funk.

She shot him? I kept to myself saying over and over.

A detective was there, waiting, and he went in with us after I'd been searched for weapons and drugs. Jenn was wide-eyed, staring out the window at Newport Harbor, and she turned to me, slowly, when we came in.

Her hands were cuffed to the bed, her eyes bloodshot, like angry red pools of blood.

"I wasn't going to let him hurt me anymore," she said. "Not again."

I pulled a chair up to her bed, took her hand. "I know. Something had to give, didn't it?"

"He kept talking about getting Tracy back. So he could love her the way he had loved me. I couldn't let him do it, Aaron."

The detective leaned over. "The way he loved you? How was that, Miss?"

Jenn ignored the cop, just looked into my eyes.

"Jenn, you've got to tell someone. No one understands. You've got to tell me, at least..."

"He wanted to fuck her like he used to fuck me."

"When did he start doing that to you, Jenn?" I asked.

"Always. He did it as far back as I can remember..."

We talked about it some more, but really, what was the point. That was what she wanted me to know. Then I asked her one more question: "What do you want me to tell Tracy?"

"Don't tell her about me. She'll never remember, anyway, but don't you ever tell her about me. I don't want anyone to remember me like this..."

"Look, if you change your mind, want to see her..."

"No!" she screamed. "Go away -- now! I don't ever want to see you again..."

Newport Beach's finest escorted me from the room, and I talked with the detective for a while, and besides learning he was an Electric Karma fan I told him about all I knew, and about the custody hearing a few years back, and that was that. Shelly drove me back to Foothill Road, and after I got my bags out of the trunk I walked around to thank her, then walked up to the house.

Lights were on, music was playing gently in the background and I turned, looked at Shelly. She looked at me and smiled, then drove off.

The door was open so I walked in, followed the music to the bedroom, found Terry laying there in her latex catsuit, a minor bullwhip already in hand, ready for the next performance. We did not come up for air for days.

We went to Gladstone's for soup and shrimp when we finally emerged. She'd had enough of London, she told me. Enough of life without me. Without California, too. When Shelly called and told her about Jenn she called British Caledonian and was on her way. I didn't ask any other questions, just told her I was happy to have her back in my life. Because I was. I called Jennie, told her what had happened, and that I'd hang around here to finish up work on the house, be back in Auckland as soon as I could. But yeah, the work was done, the house looked cool and the bedroom serene, but we didn't get out of the room much after that. We lived in a state of pure fuck, pure, nonstop fuck, like two shipwrecked people just plucked from their deserted island and turned loose on a Sunday brunch buffet.

"Should I stay here?" she asked me at one point. "Or should I go to Moorea?"

"You're Commonwealth. Come to Auckland."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

+++++

And so began the most exhilarating time of my life.

The next seven years were astonishing. Raising kids, and I do mean kids, as Jennie and I had Rebecca two years after Michelle, and after Niki gave birth to Deni -- and yeah, I know, but it had to happen -- I gave her Victoria. I took the girls sailing together all the time, the babies and their mothers, and when I wasn't tied up with them Terry tied me up. I was surrounded every waking moment by three women who loved me completely, and then I had five girls whom I doted on -- completely. Niki and I produced three more albums in that span, each better received than the one before, and, near the end of that time Jennie decided she might try for her MD.

Then all sorts of things started turning sour.

The first? Warren, working at the clinic on Moorea, simply stood up from a chair and clutched his chest, said "Oh, my," on his way to the floor -- and he was gone. Just like that. Except he was with me and Tracy when that happened. I called Jennie, in Auckland, and she hopped on a flight to Papeete with Niki and the girls. Michelle was devastated, and even Terry was, too.

I was left to settle Warren's affairs, and he declared he wanted a chapel built on the island, and he'd left funds to make it happen. No one was surprised how many lives he'd touched, or by how many who came to the dedication of the chapel, but his ashes were interred there, as I mentioned earlier, and everyone was there for the service -- even Terry, who Warren fantasized about 'til the end.

A year later Jennie found a lump in her left breast, and lets just say treatments were not as effective in the early 80s as they are now. She fought it for a little over a year and everyone was with her at the end, but she wasn't ready and she fought it. I didn't know you could fight death like that, not like the way she did. She was scared, and angry, said it wasn't her time, then she screamed and literally started to pass, then crawled back to life, only to get hysterical and start the struggle again. That lasted a day and it was horrifying to watch, but in the end it didn't make any difference, and we carried her ashes to Moorea to rest with her father's.

The girls, all of them, were as shattered as I by her passing, but what left me reeling was the thought that we never got to finish our trip together. On Troubadour. And yet she was still sitting down there on the water, waiting for my return. Then I heard that Jenn had finally succeeded, in a psychiatric prison. I didn't hear how she did it, only that she had finally succeeded, and I was left to reconcile the two of them, my two Jennifers. One doomed to a life of hell, the other doomed to a life too short. One who'd had too much, too soon, and one who'd never get enough -- linked to Tracy now and forever.

And so it was Tracy who first went to sea with me, to finish Jennie's voyage. We sailed up to Moorea, then to Hawaii, when she was nine years old when we started out together, and she was already a good sailor. Michelle was next. She wanted to see Japan, the temples and castles around Kyoto, and we spent a year on Troubadour exploring the Sea of Japan. She dove with the Ama and we walked mountain trails alive with cherry blossoms, and we took hundreds of pictures of temples. When we got back to Auckland we started painting everything we remembered. Rebecca was next, and we sailed from Japan north to Alaska, then down the coast of North America, to Newport Beach, and Troubadour had a homecoming there. I re-powered her there, replaced her rigging and sails, then Michelle joined us and we sailed her back along the track of our original voyage, from San Diego to Nuku Hiva, Papeete and Auckland.

I thought about selling Troubadour then, but Niki wanted her girls to experience life at sea, with me, so Deni and Victoria and I set sail for Australia when they were 14 and 11, then we pushed on to Cape Town, South Africa, before getting on the conveyor ride back to New Zealand. Niki wanted to take a trip with me, so we sailed up to Moorea and visited her father and Jennie in their garden. She flew home and I sailed away. It wasn't long until Victoria left for college, and I, now in my mid-fifties, Terry in her late sixties, decided it was time to fly to London and get married.

And she still cleaned my clock, her love still left me breathless and feeling more alive than was humanly possible. We left London and returned to LA, and we decided it was time to put the place in New Zealand on the market, and that was one of the last projects Shelly oversaw for me. She passed a year after the house sold, a year after Terry and I set sail from Auckland, two drifters headed out, outbound to see the world. My huckleberry friend.

We sailed from Auckland to Australia, she and I, then on to the Yemen. We transited the Suez, sailed to Greece, then Sardinia. She turned 70 in Porto, on Corsica, and we made it on the beach -- for the first time in our lives without lingerie. We stopped in Gibraltar, spend a week there getting some skin cancers cut out, then we crossed to the BVI and, eventually, two years later, we transited the Panama Canal and sailed to Hawaii, technically completing a circumnavigation somewhere along the way.

Terry fell in Honolulu, hurt her hip so we flew home to LA and I let her recuperate for a year while I wrote my first serious classical work. I filed it away for posterity when it was done, for after I was gone. Maybe someone would play it someday, but that would be for the girls to decide, not me. I did write one more Electric Karma album, and I called it Troubadour. The last of the San Francisco clan came to the house and we worked on it for three months, then Niki came and filled in the vocals, with Deni helping -- everything coming full circle on the master recording.

Troubadour fell into disuse again, languished in Hawaii for two years before I returned to her and worked her over one last time. When she was perfect again I left, alone this time, for a last voyage to California.

As Jenn and her father once had, I arced north towards Alaska, then cut east for Vancouver and picked up the currents that pulled me home. I bypassed Seattle and made for the Golden Gate, spent a week walking Berkeley, found Deni's purple paisley house had been painted an olive green that made it look vaguely military, and had to laugh at that. I walked around, tried to find some of the places we haunted, but like the Fillmore everything was gone. Troubadour and I went outside again a few days later and we turned south, bound for Santa Barbara and, finally, Avalon.

Off the casino, in that shockingly blue water, it felt like a spring day fifty years gone. LA in the distance, still lost under a blanket of brown haze. Sparkling sunlight dancing on the water, a few dozen sailboats at anchor with a cool breeze blowing out from Long Beach. The hand on the outboard's tiller is mine but I don't recognize the skin on those fingers, but that's about the only thing I can see that's changed.

Even Troubadour looks unchanged. The same white hull, the same blue cove stripe, the varnish still gleaming. A few details have changed, to keep up with technology, perhaps, but she looks ready for the next fifty years. And who knows, maybe she is. Maybe she's in that same petrified forest me and Pops were stuck in, right after he married Terry. I turned away from my feelings, turned away and looked outbound, away from all my yesterdays. I went out looking for a Terry of my own and I found Troubadour instead. Funny how life takes you places you never thought you'd go. Maybe love is the funniest thing there is.

I heard the Grumman fly over the harbor and I turned, watched it line up into the wind and land on the water just off the point, and it taxied into the harbor, pulled up next to the float off the town dock and helping hands tied the seaplane off. A moment later girls started pouring out of the old Goose, my girls, all five of them, and Niki. I came at them through the anchorage and Tracy saw me first. They turned as one, like fish turning in unison, and they waved at me. The children of three women -- and me. Sisters...what a thought. All so different -- all the same. Mine. All of bound together by our time on Troubadour, by the journeys we shared. By the Time we spent together.

I have a new inflatable now, still too small for all these girls to cram into so as I hopped up on the float, and after we hugged each other to death I turned the Zodiac over to Tracy and let her run three of her sisters out to Troubadour, then come back for the rest of us. She is the oldest and, as I'm sure you've already figured out, the steadiest of the girls. Starting her second year of medical school soon; she, of course, plans on going into psychiatry. She leaves, and Deni and Niki and I stand there in the morning sun, breathing in the new day, same as the old day...

"You know," Niki said, "I've never been out here before. Funny how far away LA feels."

"None of you have," I said, "but this is where it all started. My love for sailing, my love for Tracy's mother." I turned, pointed at an old corner restaurant. "Right there, as a matter of fact, and more than fifty years ago. Time has been kind to this old place. Change never rooted in here."

"How's Troubadour?" Deni asked. She was my secret favorite, of course. She was singing, learning to play the guitar now, after mastering the piano by the time she was five. Kind of like her old man, if you know what I mean.

"Kind of like me, Deni. Old, but serviceable."

We smiled at one another; Niki looked at me and came over, slipped under my arm. Deni came too and we hugged until Tracy made her way back through the anchorage. We loaded up and rode through the morning, lever looking back.

Coda

We sailed to Newport Beach, to where Troubadour was born, and I had her hauled. Her hull needed attention now, her gelcoat was tired and cracked, so she was due for a facelift -- and maybe another engine, too. It was funny if only because one of the guys who helped build Troubadour was the owner of the yard now, and he remembered me, and Troubadour. We got caught up on her travels and he kind of teared up when he realized what I was telling him. That his hands helped create something so strong and vital, and so important to all of us.

Then we made our way to the Beverly Hills Hotel, to two bungalows out back, and after they were settled in I walked over to the house. Terry was waiting for me, of course. Still the most beautiful woman in the world, she looks half my age now, most people mistake her for fifty. I never fail to get weak in the knees when I come into our room and see her laid out in her lingerie and heels, and today was no different.

I'm going to give Troubadour to the girls tonight, when we meet up for dinner. Shelly drew it up a long time ago, one of the last things she did for me, and I think it only fitting now. They all live in Auckland, have been Kiwis all their lives, and they'll have to get Troubadour home, somehow, to keep the journey alive, to keep keep me alive in them. To keep reaching, moving outbound, moving into the light, into the music of our lives. I know they'll begin the journey in Avalon, but of course I wonder what they'll find out there...?

And I see, in the dimness, that Terry is wearing black tonight, which means that goddamn bullwhip is lurking under the sheets somewhere. Oh...the things we do to keep our women happy...

*

© 2017 | Adrian Leverkühn | abw